Arduino and Intel bring you the Galileo, straight from Ireland

A telling quote to describe the Arduino community can be found in MAKE:Blog's talk with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich who relates a conversation with a developer who preferred to use Arduino boards for prototyping even when offered Intel boards for free. Today Intel has officially joined the Arduino team with the release of the Galileo which features a new 400MHz Intel Quark SoC with 256 MB of DRAM and Mini-PCIe slot, 100Mb Ethernet port, Micro SD slot, RS-232, and USB host and client ports for interfacing with the device. That puts it on even footing with the popular Raspberry Pi but with the ability to use Arduino shields and a mini-PCIe slot to open up some new possibilities which you will likely be reading about on Hack a Day after it is released.

That was not the only interesting bit of Arduino news out of the Maker Faire, Texas Instruments is also releasing the TRE which is essentially two Arduinos in one. The 1GHz Sitara AM335x processor is described as performing 100 times better than either the Arduino Leonardo or Uno and there is also a full AVR based Arduino present on the board to help process some tasks and to offer a more familiar environment to start playing with the Sitara from. According to The Inquirer you will be able to pick up a TRE sometime in the spring of next year.

"Krzanich’s own interest in Arduino was piqued when an outside developer told him about his product development project, and Krzanich asked him why he was using Arduino instead of an Intel board. Even when Kryzanich offered to make Intel products available to him at low cost or no cost, the developer said he valued the Maker community and the Arduino platform and he wasn’t willing to switch. Members of Krzanich’s team reached out to Massimo Banzi and they forged a partnership to develop the Galileo board and work together on future projects. Banzi said that he’s glad to have more resources and the scale of Intel to help the Arduino platform continue to develop new capabilities and reach new audiences."